Thursday, September 20, 2012

Increase Your Snoozing Time


          Hi Bloggers! Remember that day you only slept four hours because you were studying for a test and the next day you weren’t tired?   Then for the rest of the week, you wake up drowsy and tired until you slept in on the weekend.  There is a lot of psychological science behind the phrase “catching up on your sleep.”  When you don’t sleep enough, you can’t focus clearly and have trouble with spatial thinking.  If you don’t catch up on your sleep, you can continue this problem for two weeks!
So what is so important about a sleep?  Sleep allows your muscles and brain to relax.  It also is a time for REM sleep.  REM stands for rapid eye movement.  Most people know that this is where dreams are made.    During your first 5 hours of sleep, you have very little REM sleep.  After the five hour mark, you increasingly get more and more REM sleep per hour.  If you do not get enough REM sleep, you acquire a sleep dept.  Sleep debts can last up to two weeks until your body resets the clock and erases you sleep debt.
What are the effects of sleep loss?  Lack of sleep can often lead to memory loss, decrease mood, decreased effectiveness of your immune system, and an increased risk of getting into a fatal accident.  Those all sound so wonderful!  It is true though that sleep is critical for your body to function and when you deprive it of sleep, the consequences start to add up.
         The most overlooked side-effect from sleep loss?  Weight gain!  In a recent study, people who do not get their recommended sleep have a 200% higher risk for being obese.  This astonishing statistic has been proven with multiple experiments.  People, who do not get enough sleep, often compensate by over eating in order to stay awake.  Eating temporarily wakes you up due to a rush of glucose (sugar) to your blood stream.  This glucose is quickly transformed into fat and stops the overabundance of sugar in your blood stream.  The lack of sleep also affects your hormones.  The two hormones that are key in this process are ghrelin and leptin. Ghrelin is the hormone that tells you when to eat, and when you are sleep-deprived, you have more ghrelin.  Leptin is the hormone that tells you to stop eating, and when you are sleep deprived, you have less leptin.  Simple as that, if you don’t sleep enough, you eat more which results in weight gain.
There are a lot of negative side-effects to not sleeping enough.  On the flip side, those negative side-effects turn positive when you do receive enough sleep.  If you are having a hard time remembering things, concentrating, and feel down, increase your sleep by one hour and see the results.  It’s worth a try :)  Make sure you allow your body a full two weeks to adjust to your new sleep habits before you judge whether it works for you because your sleep debt has to reset.  Happy Snoozing !

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